As anyone who’s ever worked with me knows, and is no doubt tired of hearing about, I’ve been acting for a long-ass time. For all my grizzled old vet act, I don’t tend to think about it all that actively. So much so that I nearly forgot that today is the 30th anniversary of the start of my theatre career. The first rehearsal for my first show–Ah, Wilderness! at the Wagon Wheel Playhouse in Warsaw, Indiana–was May 15, 1988 (as near as I can tell the actual performances started somewhere in the vicinity of June 9.) I remember the date because it’s the day before my birthday, and I have only one memory of the rehearsal itself. Someone had baked strawberry rhubarb… something; not a cobbler, it was something more like a brownie but without the chocolate I think, and I assumed that it was for me because it was basically my birthday. I’d find such solipsism way more embarrassing but I was a literal child so I give myself a pass. Also, I hated rhubarb (I’m still not 100% sold on it.) I think someone did make or bake something the next day but I don’t really remember.
I remember quite a bit about that summer in Indiana, though not all that much about the shows themselves which is kind of a bummer. I remember that Ah, Wilderness! has a dinner scene and we all had bowls of cream of broccoli soup (Campbell’s no doubt) and plastic lobsters stuffed with white bread and after that scene I would go around and eat everyone’s leftover soup and bread because I was a ravenous monster even then. I still love cream of broccoli soup, broccoli in any form for that matter. The second show was Annie Get Your Gun and really all I remember is the time I stumbled bounding up the steps for curtain call and skinned one of my toes.
My dad has told me the story many times of my first laugh, which I “remember” because of him. My first line, on my first entrance, of my first show got laugh and he says he could see on my face that I was lost forever. He remains correct.
I remember playing Atari in the basement room I slept in during Ah, Wilderness! and watching Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. I sort of remember the house my mom and I stayed in after she came to the theatre to do 42nd Street later that summer. I remember walking to the theatre once or twice, I remember having a friend on the build crew and the work area that in my mind was like a gigantic garage and that’s where I developed my love of the smell of lumber and paint I’ve never encountered anywhere but in a theatre. I remember the Old Testament-themed mini-golf course, which was my introduction to that most noble of athletic pursuits. The first time I went, I just sort of ambled about playing whichever one looked interesting until someone explained to me how mini-golf worked. Ye gods, I was left unattended a lot that summer.
I’ve now done more productions as an adult than I did when I was a kid–14 shows between ‘88 and ‘96–but it all starts at that first first rehearsal. I wouldn’t make my Chicago debut until the fall of that year, my first taste of what we now call storefront theatre, but that’s not a memory for today. I’ll have cause to revisit that later.
A portrait of the author (right) as a young professional.